Replies

I see no need to look on it as either coincidence or as coersion. As the Scripture says, Christ came "in the fullness of time..." I don't think it is terribly profitable to try to describe it in other than those Biblical terms.

As we have belabored on this thread repeatedly, prophecy is not a blueprint that God wrote in the past, then manipulating things in such a way to make sure everyone followed his blueprint in the future, lest he look stupid for having put something in his blueprint that wasn't followed.

This implies that God has a past and a future.

Prophecy is God speaking from outside time to us who are inside time. He inspires someone from our past to foretell what will happen in our future. It doesn't need to be more complicated than that.

I don't think that when the Gospels say things like "that the Scripture might be fulfilled," they mean that Christ was play-acting and reading lines from a script. They are simply a literary way of reminding the readers that this or that event had been prophesied long ago. It is a way of saying that the God of the Christians is the very same God the Hebrews had worshipped all along. It is also another way of showing what Orthodox Christians have always believed: that "the Lord God" of the Old Testament is none other than the Son of God, the second person of the Trinity.

This is why every icon of Christ has, in the nimbus behind Christ's head, the Greek words "o on" (sorry, unlike Kolokotronis, I don't know how to do omicron and omega in html) -- which are the words in the LXX by which the Lord identifies himself to Moses from the burning bush when Moses asks him who he should say has sent him: "He who is." (Unlike translations based on the Hebrew, the LXX uses a clearly masculine pronoun, incidentally.)

(sorry, unlike Kolokotronis, I don't know how to do omicron and omega in html)

It is not HTML, really. HTML does not have a reliable way to produce Greek letters in any browser. If you install a Greek character set in your computer and go to a Greek website, you will see Greek in a variety of fonts because the server supplies a page-level language meta information; you cannot do so by posting into a page served in English by the Free Republic server. What Kolokotronis uses is a hack that works ofr some readers, but not for others, and only with one "Greek" font. It is not really even Greek, as I am about to explain. MS-Windows computers have a font called "symbol". It associates Greek glyphs with Latin letters, rather idiotically, by how they look. For example, W is glyphed Omega because it sort of looks like it (both Omicron and Omega sound as O in most languages). If your computer has this font, -- and it is a part of the stadnard Windows intallation -- you can select that font in your word processor, and type "o Wn" and get Omicron Omega Nu glyphed. If you don't --e.g. you have a Mac or a Linux, -- you get "o Wn" in the default font of that machine.

HTML allows to specify the font. The tag is , or what have you. You can add two other attributes, SIZE or COLOR. It has to be closed with

This is what I am going to type at the end of this message:

o Wn 
o Wn 
o Wn

And this is how it is going to look in your browser. If you have Symbol and Wingdings, you will see "o Wn" glyphed in these fonts, and if you don't, you will only see "o Wn" each time.

o Wn
o Wn
o Wn